You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'

Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.

Every man is the author of his own life.

I thought, "Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood." Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.